In order to find her easter egg, my daughter first had to solve a +1 transposition cryptogram with appended translation table. It gave her the location of a note with a +9 cryptogram where she was given the offset but had to write her own translation table. This led to a +9 cryptogram that resolved into Mandarin written with pinyin. She needed little help. Though since there were no tone indicators in the encrypted pinyin, she at first searched beneath a window (chuāng) instead of under a bed (chuáng).

I was going to make a Chinese language student’s joke and say that if you really wanted to drive her nuts and have her scrambling all over the house, you could use romanised Cantonese without the tone marks.

I once had a student look after my house while I was away. When I returned, I found a note on the door in Cyrillic letters. I was unable to make sense of it as Russian or Serbian and was considering the possibility that my knowledge of these languages was even worse than I realized when the light bulb lit up and I read the message right off. Although written in Cyrillic letters, the note was actually in Japanese.

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